Sociology and the Politics of AI: The Sovereign Individual Revisited

Abstract

This commentary argues that the conditions for sociological analysis of AI technologies have changed. Previously, sociologists understood AI and “intelligence” as bounded systems and, as a consequence, the key question was how machines might mimic human judgment. Today, there is a different problem as AI infrastructures are now widely diffused, aligned with concentrated private ownership and state procurement. This development was antipicated and advocated by a central text for techno-libertarians but one that is little known within sociological circles: James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual (1997). This commentary returns to the core arguments of this text to consider what sociology can be “after AI”; in a world in which AI is now embedded in infrastructural frameworks that envelop the very institutions from which sociological critique can be launched.